Nicole

A non-discriminatory baked cheese snack eater. CS 🧡

[Matt Jones @KySportsRadio]

Thank goodness for Birthright citizenship

4-1

[Ulysse 🔱 @UlysseEclaireur]

Enfin je comprends la chanson de la ligue des champions 😭😭

Je me disais aussi que je comprenais pas toutes les paroles 😅

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue.

Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate.

The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway.

Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy.

Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million.

DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder.

The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers.

Thirty-nine state governments now do.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The green sea turtle is no longer endangered. 🎉

After 40+ years on the IUCN Red List as Endangered, it's been moved all the way to Least Concern, skipping two categories entirely.

One of the biggest conservation comebacks ever recorded.

[Queens of Bravo @queensofbravo]

When you’re trying to balance work, friends & family, 8 shows airing on Bravo, and trying to stay up to date on everything related to Summer House:

[Matt Strickland @MattForVA]

This isn’t a small deal. Restaurant Depot is where most mom & pop restaurants go to buy inventory because Sysco is so expensive.

Restaurant Depot was privately owned. Sysco is owned by… you guessed it, BlackRock & Vanguard.

Now private equity can control pricing for food costs with zero competition. Just like they did with housing.

This should be an anti-trust violation, but we have politicians that work for Big Corp, not us.

[Ribz of Tik Tok @ribzoftiktok]

Possibly the greatest rib tutorial of all time

[NHL @NHL]

WOOOOOW 😱

WILLIAM EKLUND WITH A GOAL YOU'LL HAVE TO SEE TO BELIEVE!

[Nicole @lanuevanicole]

@ChangKhan_ @SLBenfica No, because Benfica wouldn’t have gay friends.

[Nicole @lanuevanicole]

Now y’all don’t want to talk about how easy it would be for an NBA team to allocate <10% of their budget to increase these salaries exponentially and then have organizations that actually benefit from each other rather than compete…..

[ClutchPoints @ClutchPoints]

The numbers tell the story quickly.

🔹 $196,267: 2025 salary in the WNBA
🔹 $200,000: 1-on-1 championship earning at Unrivaled

In a matter of nights, Chelsea Gray made more in a controlled, half-court showcase than she will over the course of an entire WNBA season.

That contrast isn't an indictment of the league, but it is a reflection of the moment women's basketball is in.

That reality is impossible to ignore.

For years, top WNBA players supplemented their income overseas.

Now, domestic offseason ventures are beginning to carry comparable, and sometimes greater, financial weight.

She remains one of the most accomplished guards of her era, and her WNBA salary reflects a collectively bargained system with max caps and structured tiers.

Unrivaled's prize money reflects market-driven spectacle, star power monetized in real time.

Both can be true.

But this week, the clearest takeaway is simple: Chelsea Gray stepped into a winner-take-all environment, bet on her skill set, and walked away with more than a full-season WNBA paycheck 💵

[Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini @DrKarimWafa]

Today, February 17 is going to be intense: a new moon, solar eclipse, Lunar New Year, Chinese New Year and the arrival of Ramadan all at once. A collective reset is happening in the spiritual realm. If you feel unusually reflective or tired, it’s the subtle energy shift 🧧✨

[Nicole @lanuevanicole]

I literally went to go look up tickets to see how much people were paying to go to the “alternate halftime show” and found it real weird there were not tickets being sold. Now it makes sense…

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 NEW: Candace Owens says the Turning Point USA “halftime show” was staged weeks before the Super Bowl in Georgia with a paid audience ($250 each), multiple retakes per song, and guests told a “bigger than Kid Rock” performer was coming.

Astroturfed hype.

[Shadow @zeeeegoat]

This put a big smile on my face

[Dr. Syed Haider: @DrSyedHaider]

For the love of God we have to outlaw almond milk.

[Larry @Tom & Marty's @tomandmartys]

More on this. During Covid wing prices skyrocketed. A 40 pound case went for around $80 to $240. So places HAD to raise their prices. So wings went from $8 a dozen to like $18 a dozen. They started offering 10 instead. And people paid.

After things settled down in say late 2021 prices returned to pre-covid levels, but places didn’t want to give up the revenue. So the switch to bigger wings started occurring. A bit more expensive sure, but still far more profitable. You are now being ripped off. I myself kept them around $12 a dozen, which is fair.

But what pisses me off is that bigger wings simply aren’t nearly as good. Too much meat. Not as crispy. The skin became secondary. Wings aren’t a meal, they’re an appetizer, something you eat with a few beers.

So now getting wings means you pay far too much for a product that’s simply not as good.

It ends now. MAKE WINGS GREAT AGAIN!

[Jake Schwanitz @JakeDNVR]

Investigate the NFL and the NFL owners for the character assassination and black balling of Shedeur Sanders in the 2025 NFL Draft.

[CHIDINMA @cruisequeeeen]

Social media needs to crash for a year so everybody can snap back into reality.

[Fernand R. Amandi @AmandiOnAir]

To my knowledge, never in its history has the United States ever allowed a foreign government to build a military outpost on its mainland soil. Words fail to capture the staggering betrayal, sabotage and borderline treason this heinous decision by the Trump regime represents.